Illinois Views: Small districts must consider school mergers

Saturday

Jun 19, 2010 at 12:01 AMJun 19, 2010 at 6:05 PM

For some small towns in America, their high school is their town. The town’s social fabric revolves around it and the everyday events that happen there — high school football season, basketball games, school plays, prom and graduation.

For some small towns in America, their high school is their town. The town’s social fabric revolves around it and the everyday events that happen there — high school football season, basketball games, school plays, prom and graduation.

That feeling was on display last week as the last classes graduated from Girard and Virden high schools, which will merge next year into the North Mac School District. The new district’s high school will be in Virden while the middle school will be in Girard.
“We invite (teachers) to our graduation parties,” said senior James Fair in a story about the last Girard High School class last week. “They’re that close to us.”

It was brave of voters in Girard and Virden to merge their school districts in 2009. We hate to see any high school close. It had to be bittersweet for the last senior class as they went through a ritual of lasts — last football game, last homecoming, last basketball game, last prom, last graduation. But the merger was the right thing to do for the future of the students in the two towns.

Girard’s final graduating class had 43 members. Virden’s final class had 50. The students who will enter high school next year will have academic opportunities their predecessors never did.

A 2003 feasibility study listed all kinds of advantages to consolidation, including better transportation and class offerings. The two high schools could only support one foreign language teacher.

The Girard-Virden combination isn’t the only recent merger. The Divernon and Auburn school districts merged successfully in 2007 because of Divernon’s declining enrollment. The merger allowed the district to offer classes it hadn’t offered before, including a family and consumer science course and K-8 art.

Girard and Virden have handled their merger with class. It was a necessary step that other smaller districts across Illinois need to consider for the sake of taxpayers and the students who attend those schools.

— (Springfield) State Journal-Register

A more ethical Congress

Guess it didn’t take long for tougher ethics oversight to become inconvenient for some congressmen.

As part of the follow-through on future House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s 2006 vow to “drain the swamp” of corruption and oversee the “most ethical Congress in history,” the House tightened a series of rules for its members, improving disclosure requirements, closing loopholes and elevating the number of eyes evaluating the conduct of elected officials.

In addition to the glacially slow, secretive committee the House has always had to police its members — often perceived as a see-no-evil panel, historically willing to offer up little more than a slap on the wrist for all but the most egregious violations of conduct — members voted to create a new Office of Congressional Ethics. The new group, run by private citizens, would have the power to launch investigations of its own into reports of wrongdoing, publicize its findings and pass them along to the Ethics Committee to deal with — while also letting state and federal prosecutors have a look-see.

Fools that they were, OCE members took their task seriously and began looking into complaints. They’re the ones who began poking around the corporate-sponsored Caribbean junket some congressmen — including former Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel — went on in direct violation of the new ethics rules. All told they’ve looked into 48 separate cases over the last two years.

From where we sit, prosecutors ought to be able to judge for themselves whether the information warrants legal action. While we understand why the pols, even the exonerated ones, wouldn’t want it to come out that their conduct had been examined in the first place, arguably such transparency builds trust. Full disclosure of the evidence, or lack of same, lets voters make up their own minds. Moreover, given the wink-and-a-nod history of the congressional ethics committee, “exoneration” from ethics charges doesn’t necessarily translate into conduct that passes the smell test. That again is a distinction voters should be able to make with the facts before them.

As ever in politics, the honest and upstanding shouldn’t have anything to fear from a little extra oversight and a little extra sunlight.

— Peoria Journal-Star

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